THE HOUSE ON COLISEUM STREET FEATURED AS BOOK FESTIVAL COMMUNITY READ
The Louisiana Book Festival’s community reading program, One Book, One Festival, is featuring The House on Coliseum Street by Shirley Ann Grau in 2013. This annual event encourages all festivalgoers to read the same book and participate in a discussion.
This year’s discussion will be led by Southern literature scholar Gary Richards, who chairs the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington.
In a separate festival event, Grau will be interviewed by author and blogger Wendy Rodrigue, exploring early novels such as The Hard Blue Sky (1958) and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Keepers of the House (1965) as well as later publications, including her Selected Stories (2003).
The House on Coliseum Street is the story of 20-year-old Joan Mitchell, who has lived her entire life in a stately New Orleans house on Coliseum Street. At home her mother and half-sister have steadily undermined her self-regard. An affair unleashes a surreal sequence of events—pregnancy, abortion and withdrawal into a numbed existence.
An intricate psychological novel that captures the pain and rage born of identity and suppressed desires, The House on Coliseum Street transcends period and place even as it evokes New Orleans in the late 1950s.

Grau was born in New Orleans. She received the Louisiana Writer Award in 2004.
The Louisiana Book Festival is Nov. 2 in downtown Baton Rouge. For more information or to sign up to volunteer, visit www.LouisianaBookFestival.org. Also look for festival updates on Facebook and Twitter.